Try this. Open the Flash IDE. Bring up the help panel. Search for “Inspectable” under All Books. See how everything that comes up is related to AS2 (apart from two irrelevent matches)? And wonder, in vain, Where is the documentation that will help me to build a component?
I’m not trying to do anything incredibly difficult. All I want to do is make a Sprite-based class, throw some instances on the stage and be able to access its setters through the “parameters” panel. Rather than make separate classes for all instances, or have some fragile and crappy inference (instance names as hashmap keys or some equally bodgy technique).
The only thing the AS3 parts of the documentation tells me is how to use existing components. Thanks, I don’t want to reskin or customise components, I want to make my own. Is that so far out? Surely the fact that the equivelant documentation is sitting there for AS2 makes it bleeding obvious that the AS3 documentation is incomplete?
On the livedocs - under the “Defining components” section of the AS2 docs - there are comments from a developer (who I think is Jennifer Petkus of Virtualight), who humbly apologises “for adding this comment in this ActionScript 2.0 page” asking how to create components in AS3.
You’re being far too nice, Jennifer! You should scream and demand that the functionality be documented! Because it is available, just not documented. Jennifer posts back a few days later with an explanation of how to do it (she has also posted a more indepth explanation over at actionscript.org). Saumya has also posted some helpful instructions, and there are more on FlashBrighton and Flexion. Thank God for people like them. But wouldn’t it be better if they didn’t have to do the job of the Flash documentation people for them? Once again, the developer community patches up Adobe’s self-inflicted wounds.
Maybe I should rename this blog “Adobe Watch”. And maybe Adobe should rename Flash CS3 to Flushable.
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